No we have history, its a vary small part of human history though. So saying we can tell monotheism "always existed" is wild speculation.

This is what i have a problem with.



Imo you cant tell they both always existed, and it would be a bad guess imo.

People evolved and from my perspective a person came up with the idea of One God. I dont think that person was the first person to evolve into a human so at one time there was no monotheism. Or for that matter polytheism or hard atheism. Both didn't always exist as far my speculating goes.

I'm saying that people make the claim that their religious views determine their views on morality. I don't think that's what happens - I think people have moral views and religion is 'retro-fitted' to suit those.
We're obvioulsy both trying to co-opt a clever person to 'our side'.

Ok, I see what you are saying. I was thinking more in terms of "religion is the source of morality", which I think is slightly different.

lol, yeah you're probably right.

I think people also make this claim, though not if they're being careful.

They are separate issues in the sense that they can each be considered in the absence of the other.

However, I also hold the position that the existence of morality (as a universal set of guiding principles for "right" and "wrong") is easier to understand in the presence of a moral God than without it. In the absence of a moral God, it's extremely hard to justify that our sense of morality has any bearing on people outside of our cultures.

For example, the notion of "human rights" as some sort of moral code that we have the authority to impose on others follows immediately from the idea that God is the one who provides humans with those rights and that we are responsible for taking care of each other (attend to the needs of the orphans and widows, and other such concepts of social responsibility). But without God, it's hard to argue that our cultural morality is "better" than another culture's morality to the extent that we are obligated to take some sort of action against others who don't share our sense of human rights. In essence, human rights are merely just the use of strong language to mask the fact that we're just saying that we "prefer" things to be a certain way.

In a lot of areas, I stay away from making specific theological statements because I know how much theology depends on cultural perspectives. If the Christian God exists, I have no doubt that there are true statements about his characteristics. However, many of the ideas I have in my head are probably not the same as the ideas held by Christians in Africa and Asia, and probably not the same as the ideas held by earliest Christians. That's just a consequence of being a 21st century American Evangelical Non-denominational Protestant instead of being a 13th century pre-Aquinas European Catholic or 1st century Greek convert.

So while I have lots of constructs in my head which help to guide my thoughts and my personal life, I don't like the idea of trying to draw too many lines in the sand to say that this or that is an ultimately true statement about God. They're usually the things that aren't worth arguing over, anyway (because those conclusions are based on the assumptions that are brought into the conversation, and most of the time there isn't agreement at that level, so there's no reason to expect agreement on the details).

I think it's because most of the time, I'm not arguing the details of a position, but instead I'm arguing about the frameworks of understanding those positions. Two people can come to the table with the same framework for discussion, but still walk away with different conclusions. So many of my arguments are broadly composed (the truth is inside of this box somewhere), and in many ways not very specific (the truth is in this corner of the box).

Sometimes it's hard to argue which culture's morality is better, but why shouldn't it be? It seems like assuming that it should be easy would make studying ethics a waste of time. If we assume that morals can only be dictated by authority it certainly makes things simpler, but only until you encounter another culture with a different God and a different set of dictated morals and human rights. At that point the idea that God is the one who provides humans with their rights makes things far more complicated (and often more violent) than they would be otherwise.

The closest thing we have to an absolute morality is the golden rule (a result of an intelligence capable of imagining the suffering of its fellow man, which very naturally leads to empathy), and we can use it to make many judgements about whether one behavior is more moral than another based upon which behavior results in less suffering. Sometimes it's difficult to quantify suffering, but often times it is quite easy. We can say that a starving child suffers more than one with a full stomach, for example. While it can't be applied in 100% of cases, it's the only moral rule that can be extended across all religions and be guaranteed to reduce suffering so far as human beings are rational and possess an instinct to preserve the species (which we clearly have or else we wouldn't have made it this far).

I never said that it should be easy. I stopped short of saying "logically unjustifiable" because it's not clear that it is. It's just that I haven't seen an argument that doesn't seem to boil down to mere preference.

If a moral God exists in the Christian sense, there is no "different God" with a different set of morals that matters. There may be different cultures that believe differently, but no true moral authority.

This entire paragraph is the sort of moral gibberish that you get when trying to discuss secular morality and stretch it to some of absolute morality. The parenthetical comment at the top is pure speculation (and actually, it's not even inconsistent with a moral God who endows man with empathy), and it invokes an implicit morality of "suffering is bad."

Logically, it's more reasonable to reject absolute morality and simply live in the fact that your moral system is culturally relative and that you can't justify certain things outside of the boundaries of your own culture.

The fact that you are invoking these arbitrary things (arbitrary from the secular viewpoint) as morality that happens to be broadly consistent with a moral God stands as "evidence" that a moral God exists, and that he has given man a conscience to guide his moral decision-making. I doubt you would accept it as such, but that's okay.

There is nothing arbitrary about our liking of sugar or our propensity for sex. Like empathy, we have those because they work and have been successful to the species in the past.
Since they are attributes which make mega sense in an evolved species it's an argument against a god ( just more things we don't need to evoke him for, like lightning and measles).

When a person joins the council who only talks at the broad, hand-wavy level and won't deal with the specific issue raised you know you're in for one of those long, fruitless cat-belling sessions. ( I usually haul out my iphone and play backgammon against jellyfish for the rest of the meeting.)

Cool story, bro.

Most of the threads are a lot of noise about details that don't really matter and aren't resolvable (another type of meeting to avoid).

My leadership mentality is much more about getting the right people to the table (ie, competent, capable people) and getting them to focus on the same goal. Then I let them do what they do well and just stay out of their way until they need something from me. In those meetings, I don't believe in arguing (or dictating) individual decisions. (If it needs to be done, it should be done in a one-on-one type of setting because not everybody needs to be in on that conversation.)

And LOL Jellyfish.

"don't really matter" only in it's the wrong focus in many cases.
"aren't resolvable" are the type of issue that causes phones to ring. Some roles consist of just that... attempting to resolve the apparent unresolvable ( most things that initially appear unresolvable, aren't).

Yes, we live in different worlds. The tables I sit around have competent and incompetent mixes of people with very different goals. Certainly challenging and ... see first comment.

I always get a kick out of the experienced players who think jellyfish cheats just because he whups their ass so badly. "he always gets doubles when he needs them". ( sometimes I tell them you can seed the same number and take the other side, usually I let them wallow ).

Greatest story ever told.

It's not so much LOL @ cheating, but I don't think Jellyfish has seen an update in the last 5 years and GNU > Jellyfish.

Your claim that we are merely making an arbitrary cultural judgement when we say "suffering is bad" seems very ridiculous to me. That statement clearly extends to any culture with an instinct for self preservation (and cultures without this instinct obviously wouldn't exist in the first place). And of course it's not inconsistent with a moral God (it seems from reading the bible that very few things are), but it's also consistent and perfectly rational to use the golden rule if God does not exist as well. You are wrong to call this "pure speculation" since it fits very neatly within the framework of evolutionary biology.

This is accurate. There is no absolute morality and the golden rule is the best that we can do, even though it can't be applied 100% of the time.

This sentence made me smile. One could just as easily say that the fact that you are living with a morality that is broadly consistent with the golden rule is evidence that your morality evolved from a naturally selected instinct for self preservation and that this is evidence that God does not exist. I don't happen to accept either of these statements as evidence for or against God, but that's okay. The point is that our framework for morality and justice works best without one and is only obfuscated by the examples of behavior in the bible that we would all agree are immoral by today's standards.

It's not as clear cut as you wish it were.

http://www.templeton.org/evolution/

It's clear from where I sit that you're trying to make science speak about philosophy, which I think is a fools errand from the beginning. I think this is the great error of many scientists. They do not understand their own philosophical framework sufficiently to understand when they have stepped outside of it, or too arrogant to realize that they are out of their area of expertise. Dawkins is the prototypical example -- no philosophers take him seriously when he starts talking philosophy. I don't think that any philosophers take Sam Harris very seriously, either, even though it's often mentioned that he has an undergraduate degree in philosophy.

What do you mean by "the best that we can do"? The best at what? How do you know it's the best?

It could be as well. I don't think that it is demonstrable within the framework provided in science, but that's a philosophical discussion and not a scientific one.

That's only if you read the Bible in the stupid way. The book of Genesis (and in fact, much of the Bible) is not a treatise on proper behavior. Theologically, it's actually mostly about how screwed up man is, and all the ways that humans behave immorally (ie, against what God's moral precepts). So it's not at all surprising to discover that the behaviors in the Bible would be immoral.

The problem is, science, which at least provides useful information, still speaks about philosophy in a more useful fashion than astrology or patent medicine does. And religion is for all intents and purposes, equivalent to astrology or patent medicine.

Yet another example of a theist using critiques of science to try and make it sound like beliefs with NO truth value get to enter the conversation as well.

This one's actually pretty bad too. The Bible ENDORSES plenty of immoral propositions, such as condemning homosexuality and masturbation and divorce, owning slaves, ordering wives to submit to their husbands, etc. It's not like a Mark Twain novel describing how crappy life was in the South while mocking it.

Wait a second, by what authority do you claim that condemning these things (bolded in particular) is immoral?

It sounds to me like you think that you should be the moral compass that we all adhere to.

Coming from the guy who constantly fails at philosophical discourse, it is of no surprise that this is a WTF type of paragraph.

Yet another example of lawdude not knowing what he's talking about.

See my previous post regarding your ability to do philosophy in a sensible manner. Circular reasoning (ie, it's immoral because I've deemed it to be immoral) is still a formal logical fallacy.

I don't think it's hard to justify - it's a question of where the "it just is" moment occurs. I think absolute morality 'just is' whereas those who explain morality via God thing God 'just is'. It's easy enough to understand - I think the problem comes when people try to prove that it must exist.

I am not the moral compass.

At the same time, homosexuality is a natural species variation (and in any event, is no basis for discriminatory treatment), divorce allows women out of abusive relationships, and masturbation is pleasurable, natural, and harmless. And we've had a social movement (feminism) that has developed the theories behind all of those positions and has had quite a lot of success improving the lot of western women, so unless you want to argue that what we really want to do is go back to the dark ages of gender inequality, I don't think you have much of a case to the contrary.

Aaron, religion and patent medicine and astrology are exactly the same for purposes of their contribution to knowledge:

Each makes claims based on events allegedly unobservable by science.
Each has no real evidence to support it.
Each claims or claimed millions of adherents.
Each is ancient in origin.
Each has texts that claim to document and evidence their claims.

My problem is that too many of your arguments are premised on the idea that if you prove that science has gaps in it or is not a fully justified system of gathering or obtaining knowledge, that means that religion is just as valid. But if it means religion is just as valid, it also means patent medicine and astrology and every other form of what Penn and Teller eloquently call "BS" are also just as valid.

The argument proves too much. Until you justify why religion is NOT the same as other forms of charlatanism or hallucination, you don't get into the conversation when it comes to actual sources of knowledge.

Aaron, if you think the Bible is correct about homosexuality deserving the death penalty, you are a homophobic bigot. Because the position taken by the Bible on the matter is, indeed, just as bigoted as the position that the Mormon scriptures took about black people.

Similarly, if you think the Bible is correct that men should beat their wives and wives should submit to their husbands, then you are an anti-feminist bigot. Because the position taken by the Bible on that issue is just as bigoted as the position that the Mormon scriptures took about black people.

As I noted in my post, we just had the last 40 years in which we finally got the picture on gender equality. And you either want to reverse it or want to excuse the moral cretins who wrote your scriptures.

I wouldn't endorse a book that justified Stalin's purges or Holocaust denial, and you shouldn't endorse books that justify killing gays or subjugating women.